In most cases, PowerShell makes easy work out of working with the registry and its various components. However, it isn’t as easy if you want to enumerate & search registry key values. I was faced with this situation recently, so here is the solution I came up with.

If you have Windows Firewall enabled then chances are that eventually you are going to find that it will be blocking one or more ports required by your applications. Checking Windows Firewall for blocked ports will help you troubleshoot your issues.

To check if Windows Firewall is blocking a port(s) that your machine is trying to communicate, follow the steps below…

Recently I needed to configure all of our 50 or so ESXi hosts to forward SNMP traps to our corporate monitoring solution. This meant enabling and configuring SNMP on each of the hosts. Naturally, I wrote a script for this as 50 hosts is way too many to do manually.

This article shows you how configure SNMP on an ESXi host manually, via PowerCLI and via host profiles.

If you have ever managed a VMware environment that contains virtual machines with RDM (Raw Device Mapping) disks then you will know it is a pain to track and manage RDMs, especially when trying to distinguish which VM has a specific RDM disk attached or if the RDM is still attached to a VM. You will also know that it is nearly impossible to find an RDM (and the corresponding VM) based on RDM’s LUN ID.

To ease the management burden of RDMs, I have written a script to search for a specific RDM by LUN ID or alternatively to get a list of all RDMs, their LUN ID, Capacity, Disk Identifier and the VM they are attached to. Below is the script and all of the details you need to get it up and running in your environment…

Today we will be discussing a topic that I believe is very important and should be at the forefront of consideration for all medium and large IT shops. The topic I am talking about is Automating User Account Provisioning.

In this article we will be making a case for automation by highlighting the common problems IT teams face when tackling account provisioning manually. We then discuss some of the solutions that are available to IT professionals when looking at automating user account provisioning. These solutions range from the do-it-yourself style all the way through to off-the-shelf products that will take care of all of the hard work for you.

As a VMware Administrator, from time to time you will need to manage disks & datastores in vSphere. The following post is a quick reference guide on how to complete some common datastore and local disk management tasks in a VMware environment: